The Implicit Punishment of Daring to Go to College When Poor

A documentary to be screened on Capitol Hill next month, in which I am featured, chronicles the experience of low-income students navigating college admissions.

By Enoch Jemmott

Mr. Jemmott is a senior at Queens College.

March 28, 2019

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Students on the Queens College campus.CreditCreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

When I heard that federal prosecutors were charging 50 people in six states for a college admissions bribery scheme and read the accounts that followed, outlining all of the other extensive, mostly legal, help that applicants from rich families get, it underscored how different the admissions experience was for me and my high school classmates in Canarsie.

The Canarsie neighborhood of eastern Brooklyn is an hour subway ride from the gleaming skyscrapers of Manhattan and a world away from the door-opening privileges enjoyed by the children of households in “good” school districts (much less the dirty-rich families implicated in the bribery scandal.) Many of us came from low-income families, and few had parents who had attended college. We vaguely knew that college was crucial for future success, but we had little understanding of how to get there — and no idea how difficult it would be to navigate the process.

We all knew of the SAT, for instance, but had no concrete idea of how to prepare for it. We knew that you had to apply to college, and for financial aid, but didn’t know the necessary or “smart” steps. When you’re 17, and pretty much doing it all on your own, the sight of all the hurdles you have to jump can be demoralizing, even paralyzing.

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Enoch Jemmott, in line outside of a local Internal Revenue Service office, as captured in the documentary film, “Personal Statement.”CreditEdwin Martinez

Most public schools in the United States don’t have a single staff member dedicated to helping students apply to college. Instead, that duty falls on school counselors who have an enormous range of other duties, like assisting teenagers in crisis and making referrals to social welfare support services, coordinating school events, and working with students with learning disabilities. A 2017 survey by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, found school counselors spend only about 20 percent of their time on college admissions.

Nationally, the average counselor-to-student ratio is 1 to 464. According to a report released this year by the A.C.L.U., 1.7 million students attend schools that have police officers roaming the halls but no counselors. At my high school, most of us wrote our college essays without adults or savvy older relatives to advise us what topics would make us more attractive candidates.

We were also on our own when it came time to fill out the dreaded Free Application for Federal Student Aid: the document you have to fill out if you need financial aid — which was the case for nearly everyone in my high school. And the Fafsa can be numbingly complex for families without a high level of financial literacy — which was also the case for nearly everyone in my high school.

The Fafsa is pages upon pages of details about your parents’ finances. I had never filed taxes, so I didn’t know what half of the terms meant. It was scary because there was so much at stake.

At the time, I was living with my sister, sleeping on her couch, because my mom was in a homeless shelter. I almost missed out on qualifying for aid because I couldn’t get the forms I needed from my mother, who was still my legal guardian.

There were days I had to skip school to get to I.R.S. and Social Security offices when they were open. (I learned only much later that because I was technically homeless, I might have been able to receive a waiver, and not had to submit all those forms.)

I was not alone — many of my friends and classmates also had difficulty getting the forms and the information needed to apply for financial aid.

But the stress doesn’t stop when you submit the Fafsa. Instead of celebrating when we received acceptance letters, and announcing them online to virtual cheers, we anxiously awaited financial aid award letters and wondered if we’d be able to afford to enroll. And the fortunate among us who got into state schools were then prompted to apply to “opportunity programs” that help disadvantaged students pay for college. That meant submitting separate applications with additional essays and financial aid forms that require even more financial documentation than the Fafsa.

I came to realize that, in every step along the way, we had to do more because we had less. So, the summer before my senior year, I attended a summer program in New York City, run by an organization called College Access: Research and Action, that trained me to work as a peer college counselor in my high school.

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The author, Enoch Jemmott, at Queens College, where he is majoring in communication.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

I would sit with my classmates for hours as they made their way through the applications. When the time came to review complicated loan offers, we did our best to decipher the terminology in the contracts, and to steer students away from the many predatory offers we received. The wide scale of such predation is an interlocking harm that sows even further distrust of financial institutions in working-class communities.

My experience and that of two other peer counselors is chronicled in the documentary “Personal Statement,” which will be screened on Capitol Hill next month. We hope the tangible, harsh realities depicted in the film will help those who witness it see the urgency of the issue.

Right now, the system feels like it is crafted to keep low-income students like us out of college. If it is, it’s working: Only nine percent of people from the lowest income quartile receive a bachelor’s degree by the age of 24, compared to 77 percent for the top income quartile.

That some rich families bribe their children’s way into college is the least of our problems. We’re more concerned by the college guidance gap and the maze of applying for financial aid. It shouldn’t be that difficult, fiscally or strategically, to get college advice and to fill out the Fafsa. Higher education’s admissions system should be designed to support our success, not to suppress it.

Enoch Jemmott is a senior at Queens College, where he studies communications.